Venus Over Los Angeles presents, Katherine Bernhardt: Fruit Salad, a large mural covering the exterior walls of the L.A. gallery; a public iteration of her signature wildly colorful still life patterned paintings. Fruit Salad will serve both as Katherine Bernhardt’s first foray into executing a public mural, and as a prelude to her upcoming solo exhibition at Venus Over Manhattan in September. Katherine Bernhardt’s recent series of paintings offer vibrant portraits of objects that exemplify the casually quotidian in acrylic and spray paint. She covers her canvases with a painterly hodgepodge of commodity items such as fruit, cigarettes, junk food, and objects of New York’s day-to-day that float against richly colored, striking backgrounds that themselves seem to push forward and demand the viewer’s attention. The patterns emerge without source material, purely from the artist’s thoughts and imagination, and driven by her experiences. With this in mind, the pieces become part of a larger portrait of the artist herself to be pieced together by the viewer. The often times random assortment of objects relate to one another in a way that is presumably deeply personal to Bernhardt herself. In fine Los Angeles fashion, the exhibition will be on view indefinitely. photographs by Sara Clarken
